My seven-year-old daughter has a friend round for dinner. They're pretending that raspberries are lipstick and squidging them against their lips, with lots of giggles and red-stained fingers. I could object. Instead, I smile and start loading the dishwasher.

It's not that I think table manners are entirely unimportant. I have no intention of raising slurpy, finger-licking, face-smearing chimps. But I've always instinctively felt that if I wanted my children to grow up with a positive, happy, healthy, adventurous attitude to food, nagging them from a young age to behave like mini adults at the dinner table was going to be counterproductive. Not only would it create tensions at the table, it would crush their enthusiasm and open-mindedness towards food pretty damn quickly.

My own childhood memories of mealtimes are still marred by my mum constantly pestering me to hold my knife right and telling me off for sculpting faces in my Angel Delight with my spoon. No, if I wanted my children to explore food by eating it, I was going to have to relax and let them explore it in any other ways, too.

Food is, after all, multisensory. It doesn't appeal to us through taste alone. The smell of freshly baking bread can sell houses. The colour of the inside of a perfectly ripe avocado is good enough to be painted on living room walls. And the snap of a carrot stick is a rather satisfying sound. A young child learns about the world directly through their senses. Just as a five- or six-month-old puts toys in their mouth as part of their developmental process, so babies and toddlers naturally want to touch food, feel it, squidge it, squelch it, sniff it and see what noises it makes. It's not a substitute for eating, or a distraction from it. It's an important part of learning to love food and to be comfortable around it.

Anna Groom is a lead NHS paediatric dietitian. She works with children who are "selective eaters" (fussy buggers to you and me) on a daily basis. "It's really important to let children explore the sensory side of food as a whole – not just what it tastes like," she says. "It makes it more familiar to them. It makes them feel 'safe' with it." The idea is that they are more likely to try it, and less likely to become fussy.

She points out that the emphasis on keeping everything clean and tidy and under control at mealtimes often starts at weaning. Watch many a parent feeding her baby and notice how they scrape the spoon around the baby's mouth after each mouthful, how they hold the bowl at arm's reach when the baby swipes for it eagerly. Yet exposure to a food, she explains – any exposure – is a vital first step, whether the child eats it or not. "When I work with children who have become phobic about a particular food, I get them to draw it, touch it, play with it, smell it, kiss it, lick it!"

So – even at age seven – I will continue to let my daughter mould sand dunes out of her rice, make a clown's nose out of cherry tomato or put a blob of peanut butter on her boiled egg just to see what it tastes like. I am teaching her table manners, but I'm doing it gradually and gently. In fact, I believe it has the most impact when I talk to her about them away from the table, when she's not hungry and trying to enjoy her food. The other day, as she was engrossed in using her fork to make fossil patterns in her mashed potato, she looked up and said: "You know Mummy, I wouldn't do this if I was in a restaurant."

My other child is now 14. He has always eaten everything and anything that comes his way, with the exception of raw tomato. How are his table manners? Pretty good. I've noticed he still likes to have a (discreet) animalistic sniff of a frankfurter before he puts it in his mouth, but he knows how to eat politely and conform to society's expectations.

By the time I've finished loading the dishwasher, the girls have gone off to play. I go to clear the last things from the table. The squashed raspberries have all been eaten.